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The silly season endures

Speaker John Boehner is in a real pickle. His caucus is in constant disarray. He frequently is unable to forge compromises, even within his own party. As a result, he can't make deals with the Democrats in Congress or the president of the United States. So what can he do?

Speaker Boehner decided to sue the president for "doing his job."

This is yet another in an endless line of "red herrings" — the dragging of a dead fish across a trail to distract hounds from pursuing the fox — that Republicans have dragged across the path of progress. They've mastered the misleading and irrelevant. And some partisan pundits and their allies in the media too eagerly follow the false trail rather than reporting how congressional Republicans are standing in the way of what the American people want.

Most leaders want a legacy of getting something done; Boehner apparently wants a legacy of getting nothing done. Some Republicans leaders in Washington are secretly pleased to paralyze our government, to bring it to a grinding halt, as we have seen them do again and again. Twice Boehner has brought the United States to the brink of default to force, not a budget compromise, but a surrender to the far right extremists in his party's base.

When Republicans officeholders say Washington is broken, they are not complaining about it. They are bragging about it — because they broke it. If you can't win an election, the next best thing is to foot-drag so the changes and reforms people voted for can't get passed.

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The list of popular items Republicans are holding up is long: closing corporate tax loopholes, putting higher education within reach of all, mandating background checks for gun sales to catch the mentally unstable, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, providing unemployment checks when there are still far more job-seekers than jobs ... all basic, common-sense measures to restore our economy. Yet they oppose all.

Republicans have held up the nominations of our ambassadors, creating a backlog so serious it has interfered with the president's efforts to constrain the advance of terrorists in Iraq.

Perhaps Speaker Boehner's biggest obstruction is on immigration reform — another thing he nonsensically blames President Obama for, saying his followers don't trust the president, so why do anything?

The Republican Party leadership behaves worse than hyperprivileged teenagers on a bad day. They have an excuse for everything, and blame everyone but themselves.

If Boehner brought immigration reform up for a vote, it would probably pass because enough Republicans support it to pass it with the Democrats' help. Boehner refuses to allow a vote because he is bowing to the hard right-wing, no-compromise tea party Republicans who want our government largely abolished.

Boehner's lawsuit against the president has very little chance of succeeding. So what's behind it? As outgoing Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann said on Fox News, "What we can do is impeach the elected official."

To bring that about, Republican leaders engaged in extra-constitutional measures to thwart Obama from carrying out the voter's mandate.

Put aside the partisanship, read between the ideological lines, study the history of the separation of powers debate, and one is forced to conclude that Bachmann, Boehner and others, in trying to make Obama bow to their agenda, employed measures beyond the Constitution's authority to do so. Nothing was off-limits, including shutting down the government itself and willfully bringing the nation to the perilous edge of financial default. Now, this.

After five years of Republican obstruction, Obama has been forced to turn to issuing executive orders to accomplish what the gridlocked Congress refuses to do. Executive orders are an old and Constitutionally tested way of doing business. Obama himself taught Constitutional law. White House lawyers have treaded carefully, at his direction, to verify the orders' lawfulness. By contrast, President George W. Bush's lawyers basically told him that our laws did not apply to him in the security arena, and he issued more executive orders than Obama.

A study by the Brookings Institution of all the presidents found that they had to go back to Grover Cleveland to find one who issued fewer executive orders than Obama.

Some analysts believe Boehner is bringing the lawsuit to head off tea party Republicans pressuring him to order impeachment proceedings, a "cause" so outlandish it would energize those who voted for Obama in 2012 to vote Republicans out and end this nonsense.

Boehner apparently got the idea from a column written by my colleague George Will, who is famous as a baseball expert, but less so as a Constitutional law expert. Even Will acknowledges that courts have traditionally refused "disgruntled legislators" standing to sue the president.

As Rep. Mark Pocan, representing Wisconsin's 2nd Congressional District, said, "Speaker Boehner is allowing the tea party tail to wag the dog. ... Unfortunately, this Republican-controlled House of Representatives has no intention of actually governing and will continue to block any effort by President Obama at the expense of our constituents." And the American people will continue to pay the price.

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